I'm in the process of formatting my father's laptop. I used GParted to format all the partitions. I formatted all three of the partitions to ntfs. I put in the Windows XP disk and after I pressed "ENTER" to begin windows setup, it gave me a message saying that there are no hdds detected

if gparted saw it, maybe you need to supply the drivers for the hdd. type the model number into the manufacturer's website and see if there are drivers available for download. put them on a floppy and then boot the windows installation disc, pressing F6 when prompted to load the drivers.

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There are 10 types of people in this world. People who understand binary and people who don't.

There is no floppy drive on the laptop. I'm guessing it is a driver issue because the HDD is showing up in BIOS also.

yeah, if bios doesn't see it, nothing should see it. including gparted.
i use an external usb floppy drive at work, i'm sure one could be found for very cheap on ebay or newegg.
to my knowledge, there isn't a way to load drivers on an XP installation via flash drive, but you might want to ask google about that. it may very well be possible.

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There are 10 types of people in this world. People who understand binary and people who don't.

nlite is a program for creating your own windows installation discs for NT based OS's, then there's vlite for vista and probably 7 too. it allows you to take your original xp installation disc and add things to it such as drivers, service packs, settings, etc, and then burn a new copy of the disc.
it's incredibly easy, even if you've never used it before. my only piece of advice is that if your only obstacle right now is drivers and you don't have time or some cdrw's to experiment with, only add the drivers. if you have a day or so, knock yourself out. it can be really helpful.
the process of adding these things to the installation disc is called slipstreaming. i like to slipstream service packs, it saves me time everyday.
both nlite and the drivers are free for download.

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There are 10 types of people in this world. People who understand binary and people who don't.